WTB: Pure lead for muzzleloading bullets

[barnabus]

looking to purchase or trade for pure lead for making muzzleloading bullets . looking for about 25lbs. ive had a time trying to find someone who isnt selling a unknown alloy or misrepresenting the lead as pure. pm me plz

[One Gun Andy]

Where are you located?

[sparky45]

Pure Lead Ingot(s) cast from reclaimed water pipe. $2.50/lb shipped in a small Priority USPS box. Approx. 15~20# + shipping.

[RogerDat]

It does sometimes help if you add a general location to your profile. Sometimes it allows for people in the same general area to arrange a face to face sale and avoid shipping. Or even a swap. Closest major city such as my profile, or South Central Michigan etc. Just something to let folks know a general area without posting your actual home town. Have done a couple of lead deals meeting at a gun show that other members also attend, they come from the south to the show, I come from the west but we both were able to see that as a possibility due to our general area being in our profiles.

Pure lead is generally foundry lead. Plain soft lead is more common. Water pipes, xray shielding, plumbers lead ingots, lead flashing will all be very soft lead. Some may have a trace amount of antimony or tin in them but for most purposes they are as soft as plain lead. 99.9% pure is foundry lead and that runs $3 per pound plus shipping. Those of us who collect and use scrap find what works and use it. If we are smart we keep the more well defined items separate and use the less well defined as a mixer with WW's or Printers lead where any small amounts of deviation from plain lead will be averaged into the larger batch.

I know some of this went through my ML and it worked just fine. I have also used lead came, and xray lead shielding. I know those to be very soft and nearly pure so they stay separate.

If the form of the lead makes it identifiable I tend to keep it in raw form. No reason to melt it if not melting it allows me to determine the source. Or at least process it together and label the resulting ingots as I did with the lead pipe being melted in the picture. The pipe is too bulky to store as is so ingots it becomes but the batch is labeled so I know it is all from that batch of pipe.



Much of what is sold as plain lead will be a little short of 99.9% pure but if the difference doesn't matter folks just use it. A big mixed batch that contains "unknown" lead such as diving weights or say lead pipe with solder joints all melted in with the pipe that situation can create issues in some cases.

[40-82 hiker]

Barnabus,

Please PM me. I'll send you 10 to 12 lbs. or so of stick on wheel weight ingots on my dime in a SFRB to get you going with some verifiable lead (my word). I separate out the "hard" stick-on weights, so this lead should be around Bhn of 6. Usually considered "pure" for BP uses. Works fine for me. It has just a little tin from the manufacturing process (around 0.25% or so), but no antimony. If you like it you can send me the USPS postage. If you don't like it, just re-gift it and keep the postage. But, you will like it.

Bob

[sparky45]

Generous offer hiker.

[RogerDat]

SOWW's are another "keep separate" item for me. I know what they are. Soft lead. I just never got around to using them in casting for muzzle loader. I won't use those for mixing into a big batch of bullet alloy as long as I have other "plain" lead to throw in. I cast soft hollow base wad cutters with plain and some tin that gets my "generic" plain lead. The known stuff gets set aside.

It is a generous offer but not surprising in this community. We tend to help each other out.

[Uncle Jimbo]

PM sent.